


The Only True Horror Story about Disney World

by JCMorrigan



Category: Disney - All Media Types
Genre: (Psst the narrator is a self-insert), Ambiguous/Open Ending, And wore it to WDW, Any excuse to write Mozenrath!, CreepyPasta style, Different approach than most Parks horror stories, Disney horror written by actual Disney fan, Gen, Horror, It's about atmosphere, No Gore, Nothing visceral, Set at a Disney park, Spot of hope, Swearing, That probably gives away the twist though, The T rating is mostly for swearing, The gauntlet thing she wears is based on a true story, Trust me this is fanficcy enough to count for AO3, Trying to fill the horror niche on this site with my fave fandoms, i.e. I have one, nameless narrator - Freeform, oh well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22886167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JCMorrigan/pseuds/JCMorrigan
Summary: You read online horror stories, right? You've read all those stupid ones about how the Disney parks are host to some government conspiracy or zombies or whatever? Pretty sick of those, right? I know I am.Mostly because I know the truth about Disney World's dark secret. And it shook my world more than any of those stories ever could.***I do enjoy a spot of horror, and I wrote this a while ago for fun because I thought of a new take on the "Disney World CreepyPasta" idea. After realizing I don't find much horror on AO3, I realized that due to the nature of the twist (which you can probably guess), this story was actually enough of a fanfic that I could put it here on AO3 instead of making a whole new account on some CreepyPasta site to host it. Besides, it adds to the Mozenrath tag, and I'm always glad to do that!
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	The Only True Horror Story about Disney World

I’m sure you’ve all heard the edgelords screaming by now. The quickest way to get clicks on any horror site is to write about how Disney World or Disneyland or just Disney is secretly some Satanic cult filled with monsters, and how the parks are haunted or some shit.

Let me tell you this: they’re onto something, but they’re onto the wrong thing. The truth is so much more complicated than you could know.

My experience occurred over a week-long family excursion to Disney World. Staying in a cramped hotel block with five younger cousins isn’t exactly a cakewalk, but it was worth it. Though I was a fully-grown adult, I still loved Disney in all of its forms. I mean, sure, I could take or leave Wreck-It Ralph, but does Wreck-It Ralph really count?

I especially liked to look at old animated series that didn’t air anymore. If you’re expecting some Lost Episode bullshit, this isn’t that kind of story. They didn’t air because the Mouse House just got tired of them and replaced them with other things, and for reasons most assuredly corporate, never think to put them on DVD. I’ve had to use some back doors to get to what I wanted to watch, but I’ve never run into anything shadier than a risqué scam pop-up that Firefox could easily dispose of.

This was how I began my fascination with Mozenrath. And if it hadn’t been for Mozenrath, I would never have known anything was going on.

That name might not mean anything to a lot of you. See, in the 90s, Disney was big on making animated series that extended the canon of a lot of their popular films: The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, etc. Actually, it didn’t stop after the 90s – Tarzan got one, Atlantis almost got one, and now the legacy lives on with Tangled and Big Hero 6. The best one by far, however, is the Aladdin animated series. It was also one of the longest-running, with a colorful Rogues Gallery of villains to cycle through and new magical locations and plot devices made up for every week’s adventure.

Mozenrath only appears in a handful of these episodes, but he’s one of the villains who has left the biggest impression on fans of the show who remember it from childhood. He’s a sorcerer, sort of in the same vein as Jafar, but more around Aladdin’s age, and filled to the brim with clever banter topped with a hair-trigger temper. Also, he’s attractive. I’m not even going to lie there. But Mozenrath stood out to me as the pinnacle of villainy. He was the most delicious of nefarious tropes boiled down to their purest form.

I really wish I could still like him.

I went a little overboard. There wasn’t much official merch to come by of this series, so I settled for making my own. I learned to crochet for the sole purpose of crafting a gauntlet identical to his signature weapon in the show, which drains his life force in exchange for powerful magic. I managed to get it to fit my hand perfectly, and I, being the nerd I am, started wearing it in public. A little sign that only I really knew about (or anyone who happened to remember the show).

So, naturally, when the family and I packed up and went off to Disney World, I thought it would be funny to wear the gauntlet for the duration of the trip.

You know the costumed characters who walk around the parks for kids to meet and who stand at preordained locations for photo ops? I had always seen them as sort of my…bridge to the fictional world. These characters I loved weren’t real, but these actors who were doing their best to emulate them were.

So when the family and I met Aladdin and Jasmine, I was just as excited as the younger children. Now, to really set the stage, I’m going to have to let you know that they were only two in an absolute parade of characters who we saw milling about. The thing is, I’ve been to the Parks before, and this is the first time I could remember seeing that many villains in public, everyone from the Tremaines to Dr. Facilier. Now, being that I love the villains, I was very glad about this development.

Back to Aladdin: I was wearing the gauntlet. When I met him, he asked me about it – specifically if I used it to catch monkeys. I told him I got it from a sorcerer in his kingdom, and he said if it was Jafar’s, I could keep it.

So obviously, this actor was never briefed on the animated series. Understandable, as it hadn’t been legally available for decades. I resigned myself to just taking some fun photos with him and calling it a day.

Now, things started to get weird later that same day, but I didn’t catch on just then. This one seemed reasonable, after all. We met up with an Ariel actress, one who I swear was able to model Jodi Benson’s voice perfectly. No wonder she’d gotten the role. As we took pictures, one of the cousins asked her where we could meet Ursula.

I was caught off guard by how genuinely frightened she looked. “You don’t want to do that,” she told my cousin.

I thought, at the time, she was just a really good actress, and she had to come up with an excuse for why there was no Ursula character in the park.

As much as I’d love to set the stage by telling you about our day at the park, riding rides and eating at exquisite establishments, that really wouldn’t serve a purpose here. I’m here to inform, not to give you a travel diary. Needless to say we had fun.

Day two. My cousins wanted to meet more characters, so we hit up Dr. Facilier. I had always loved seeing Facilier actors on YouTube clip comps – they consistently managed to capture his charm and remind me why I loved the animated version so much. This actor was no exception. He was exemplary, in fact. And when he asked my little cousins to “Stop by my parlor sometime…I’d love to give you a little tarot reading,” I got chills.

He almost seemed disappointed when we moved on, and my mind filled in that if it were the real Facilier, he would have been sad because he had actually intended to take one of my cousins aside to trick into some horrible fate in exchange for a wish of theirs being misinterpreted.

The youngest wanted to see Aladdin again, since that was her favorite movie, and given that I shared it, I decided to take her all by myself so as not to slow down the rest of the group. Today’s Aladdin actor was definitely different from the previous. I had been impressed with yesterday’s – he had obviously studied his subject well. This Aladdin, however…I couldn’t explain it, at the time. The way he moved seemed animated in and of itself. His facial expressions were exactly what animated Aladdin would make, were his proportions real. This guy was operating on a skill level the previous one couldn’t even comprehend.

We took some photos, and he signed an autograph book for my cousin, not caring that he had apparently signed it yesterday as well, when he was someone else. Upon leaving, he put out his hand for me to shake, and I did so.

That was when he froze. He looked down at my hand as if it were covered in spiders.

I wondered if I’d somehow gotten something on my hand that I hadn’t wiped off properly, like a dollop of ketchup. Then I remembered I was still wearing the gauntlet, which was still clean (on the outside, anyway; the Florida heat had doled out its fair share of sweat to the interior). I couldn’t tell, at first, what the source of Aladdin’s mortification was.

He leaned in close to me, and in a whisper only I could hear, he said, “You’re not supposed to have that.”

Finally, an Aladdin actor who recognized Mozenrath paraphernalia! Though why he was being so conspiratorial about it, I couldn’t imagine. I decided to play along; “I’m just borrowing it. I’ll give it back.”

“Don’t play with it,” Aladdin warned me. “You have to hide it, or get rid of it, or – something! If he figures out you have it…”

By then, he realized how bizarre he was being, and he let go of my hand, regaining his composure.

The rest of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about the encounter.

Before I go further, I should probably explain a few more things about Mozenrath. He had a very distinct and elegant character design, wearing what looked like Persian emperor’s robes in a gorgeous shade of royal blue offset with gold and black. Furthermore, the gauntlet took his life force, but also a physical toll. More than one episode gave the memorable reveal of the gauntlet coming off to show only fleshless bone making up his right hand and lower arm. I can still quote the monologue he says when he explains it to this day.

Day three, and we headed for the Haunted Mansion ride. I had secretly been wanting to do this one since we set foot in the park, but the parents of the group had debated as to whether it would be too frightening for the small ones. It was determined the smallest two should stay behind, with an aunt to chaperone them, while the rest of us entered the Gothic domain.

I had ridden the Haunted Mansion many a time in the past. I always loved seeing the different ghostly effects around the attraction and feeling the chills from watching the paintings shift and the chandelier levitate its way down the hall. And who doesn’t get the heebie-jeebies from Constance Hatchaway? This time, however, seemed oddly different.

Are you expecting me to say that things didn’t go as they should have, or that the attraction suddenly came alive and started to murder people? No. Again, it’s not so simple. Absolutely nothing was different, physically. The stretching paintings still had the same morbid punchlines. The ghosts in the ballroom had a merry old time, without a strange sight among them. What was different was the atmosphere. You know the feeling you get sometimes, that you’re being watched? That was the kicker. I felt as though I had hundreds of pairs of eyes on me at all times. Now, since the Haunted Mansion is ridden in groups, I could’ve just explained this away with other park-goers. But somehow, that didn’t feel quite correct.

It wasn’t until I exited the ride, to the tones of “Hurry baaaa-aaaack,” that I realized this feeling was similar to what I’d felt when Facilier had been so convincing the day prior. Somehow more unsettling than it should be. Wasn’t the point of Disney to be convincing?

It was all about to come crashing down. We met up with the smaller cousins, and the aunt excitedly talked about a rare character they’d met who she couldn’t remember ever having seen before. The kids had been so excited to see him, even without knowing who he was. In fact, a lot of the crowd had looked at him with confusion, given that his costuming was so elaborate, but he seemed to be from something most people hadn’t seen. They’d gotten his autograph in the autograph book, though, and since I was a resident Disney hipster, they wanted me to tell them what movie he was from.

My initial reaction upon seeing the word “Mozenrath” signed in neat script was pure confusion.

I then leapt for the most obvious explanation. I had to disappoint my aunt by telling her he couldn’t have been part of the park staff. No one had cared about Mozenrath in twenty years. No one would even recognize him. This had to be an amateur cosplayer.

To this, my aunt expressed doubt, saying his costume had just been so intricately detailed, it had to be official. She described it exactly as I knew it – royal blue, black cape, gold accents, down to the red gem in the turban.

To illustrate the point, she got out her digital camera to show me the photos she’d taken of the cousins with him. However, all of the images were corrupted. I never saw that particular actor, cosplayer, or whatever he was – well, not that day, anyway. The corruption came in the form of screens filled with bright blue light.

“I must’ve left the flash on,” my aunt muttered.

“Maybe Mozenrath just erased the evidence with magic,” I said as a joke.

After which I suddenly felt very uneasy.

Day four. I was still trying to parse out the whole Mozenrath incident, to no avail. It seemed either a really convincing cosplayer had gotten in, or, unbeknownst to me, they actually had resurrected Mozenrath at the parks, meaning I would need to find and get a photo with this cast member tout de suite.

However, my train of thought was interrupted when we found Grimhilde, the evil queen from Snow White. Again, I was stunned with just how perfectly this actress was able to capture Grimhilde’s elegance and sense of superiority. She even did a few lines in the voice of the hag, which was spot-on.

I didn’t recall her having anything in her hands, though. When she offered my oldest cousin an apple, I had no idea where she’d gotten the fruit from. It was obviously a candied apple, the kind you’d see on sale at the booths. “Would you like an apple, dearie?” she joked in the hag’s voice. “It’s only a magic wishing apple. No harm in it whatsoever. After all, Snow White is only a fairy tale.”

It all just built up. The cryptic warnings from other cast members not to engage the villains. Facilier offering to take us aside to read our futures. The Haunted Mansion feeling truly haunted. The mysterious Mozenrath.

I lunged forward and knocked the apple to the ground, screaming, “NO!”

Everyone in my family looked at me like I’d just punched my cousin in the face. She started to bawl; she’d wanted that candied apple.

Grimhilde, however, just gave a very in-character laugh. Too in-character. I’m pretty sure doing that while a child is literally crying in front of you isn’t in the cast member handbook, even for the villains.

I fired her a dirty look over my shoulder as we hustled my cousin aside to buy her a replacement treat.

I then had to explain why I’d done what I’d done to my parents and relatives. That was a doozy. How could I possibly get away with attempting to pose my theory that Disney villains were real, and occasionally stalked the park? I suddenly felt like an idiot. I just muttered a poor excuse about getting too caught up in the act.

My parents were rather cold to me the rest of the day. I would be, too, if I’d seen my daughter smack candy away from my niece.

But I thought I saw him. The Mozenrath from yesterday. The fluttering of a black cape caught my attention. As soon as I turned to look, however, I could see no one wearing anything close to a black cape.

On the fifth and final day, I knew I had to figure something out. I said I wanted some alone time in order to blow off steam from the day prior and sort out my problem distinguishing fantasy from reality. That got me an excuse to wander the park at my leisure, alone.

I could only think of one place to get my answers: Aladdin. I noted with delight that it was the same actor who’d warned me on the second day. I lined up to greet him, but he was changed out for another actor in the midst of my wait.

I, however, was determined.

I managed to slip away and track him, following him to a break room that I’m sure no parkgoer was supposed to see (no, there were no dark secrets here, no murder houses, no sex clubs; just a fairly unmagical lunchroom with sparse decoration that would’ve ruined the atmosphere). By the time he noticed me, I knew I had to act fast before he called security.

“Is he real?” I asked. I held up my hand.

“Pfft…what, Mozenrath?” he laughed off. “He’s just a character.”

“Something weird has been going on in this park since I got here,” I asserted. “Facilier and Grimhilde have tried to tempt my cousins to the dark side. The Haunted Mansion actually feels haunted. You’re not the only cast member who’s tried to warn me about their villain. And I think…I think I’ve seen a cast member who’s not supposed to be here.”

“Oh, boy,” Aladdin squeaked, now aware of how grave the situation had become. “He’s been out again. Look – “

“I’m not leaving this park until I get some answers,” I threatened.

To that, he was suddenly behind me, seizing my mouth so I couldn’t speak. “Look,” Aladdin hissed in my ear, “I’m not supposed to do this. It’s for everyone’s safety. But lately, things have been kinda…not safe. It might be better for everyone if you do know, with how much they’ve been doing things lately. But I’m not gonna say anything that could get recorded, and that way, you can say you never heard it from me, okay?”

I nodded.

“Let’s go,” he continued. “I promise you won’t get hurt. Just stick with me, and I’ll keep you safe.”

The feeling I had then was the opposite of my dread with the villain incidents. It was a sense of comfort. I fully believed that Aladdin could and would protect me. With this surge of confidence, I nodded again, signaling us to move forward.

Aladdin brought me through a passageway leading to a small lounge of sorts for cast members. When we heard a pair of voices up ahead, Aladdin halted suddenly. “Shh,” he warned me. “You gotta keep quiet.”

I didn’t even want to speak. I was too flabbergasted at what I was hearing. Not the words themselves, not at first. I was getting excited because the voice I was hearing sounded exactly like Jonathan Freeman, the voice actor for Jafar. I wondered if maybe they’d brought Freeman onto the park campus to record some lines for a stage show, and I was in the presence of a true Disney idol.

“ – the consequences of your actions, BOY,” Freeman (I thought) was saying. “Your wanderlust risks our exposure!”

The voice that responded made my blood run cold.

“You’re not in charge around here,” it said. “As much as I hate to take a page from Aladdin’s book, he really was onto something when he said you’re only in trouble if you get caught.”

That voice sounded exactly like Jonathan Brandis, who had voiced Mozenrath for his limited run (save the episode where Jeff Bennett filled in for him). Now, you don’t need to have been a fan of the Aladdin show to know why that shouldn’t have been possible. If you were alive in the 90s, you know that Brandis committed suicide. Meaning the person I was listening to was either a really good impressionist, or…

Or maybe it wasn’t Freeman I was hearing talking to him, either.

“The time grows nigh for our grand uprising,” the Jafar-voice scolded. “Chernabog will rise, and for the first Fantasmic show in recorded history, the mouse will FAIL to stop him! And it will all be assumed to be part of the script! However, if we’re found out, there will be no chance of our victory!”

“Oh, ia, ia, Chernabog ftaghn,” the Mozenrath-voice said sarcastically. “You think I care what that oversized bat has to offer us? I’m after my own agenda.”

“You’d better learn your place, boy, or – “

“Or what? You’ll tell my mommy? You’ll ground me?”

I heard a slap. The Mozenrath-voice cried out “OW!”.

“We’ve enough to deal with, now that the heroes are becoming aware!” the Jafar-voice scolded. “They may yet design a method of allowing the mouse to overpower our reign of darkness! Should the nonmagicals discover the plan, we’ll be outnumbered!”

“You’re forgetting one thing,” the Mozenrath-voice coughed. “If we’re found out, we don’t go down alone. The public eye will turn on the do-gooders and drag them right down with us. Now, those are the odds I like better…our foes as strangers in a strange land, and us asserting our superiority with our natural talents, not some church-bell-phobic – “

I sneezed.

I was suddenly filled with horror. The two voices fell silent. There was no way they hadn’t heard that. I hadn’t even seen it coming; it had just happened –

Aladdin grabbed my wrist, hissing, “Run!”

He led me out of the lounge area, out of the cast member domain, back into the park proper. All the way to Main Street, USA, where it turned out my family was gathering for the fireworks show.

“How did you know – “ I started to ask.

“Hey, I never reveal my secrets.” He winked at me. “But you can’t tell anyone what you saw here, understand? I think you heard enough to get it.”

I had. If word got out that the Disney characters were real – which I was ninety percent sure was the plot twist happening here – then they’d become lab rats for the mass media. “I still have so many questions,” I told Aladdin. “How are you even real? Is it magic? Is this a portal to another world? Is – “

Aladdin shook his head; “Remember, you can’t hear it from me! You should go back to your family and enjoy the fireworks show. Don’t worry. For every bad guy that’s out there, there’s a hero watching over you.”

And then he was gone. One jump ahead of me.

I returned to my family, and we watched the festivities. Despite Aladdin’s reassuring words, I still felt unease. I was, for the first time in my life, anxious to leave a Disney park, and quite glad it was the last day of our trip.

What I learned that day is something that no one “real” should know. Though what even makes a person real or unreal, now that I know what I know? Maybe this is all just a lesson that I should treat what I don’t believe in with more respect. That anything’s possible.

I came back in one piece. For all intents and purposes, I’m fine, regardless of the immense burden of knowledge that’s been placed on me. However, I have reason to believe I’m not as safe as I think, and when I hear my relatives plotting next year’s Disney vacation, I’m filled with dread, trying to think of excuses to get out of it, to move the destination elsewhere, anything I can.

After the fireworks show, we took the monorail out of the park as opposed to the ferry. By that time, it was almost pitch-dark, which didn’t make me feel all that much better about what I’d just learned.

If you’ve ever taken the monorail out of a Disney park after the fireworks show has ended, then you know how batshit the crowds can get. I was momentarily separated from my family in the tumult on the car; I just kept my uncle’s red jacket in sight so I wouldn’t panic. As the crowd filtered out of the car at the end destination, I tried to hurry toward that jacket as quickly as I could.

But I tripped.

I was caught before I could hit the ground, a good Samaritan’s hands catching my shoulders. I was pulled upright, my heart pounding. I turned my head to get a good look at my savior – only to find that I couldn’t. He was a little taller than me, and from the looks of it, he was an attractive man, but his eyes were shielded by sunglasses despite the dark of the night, his forehead obscured by the brim of a black baseball cap through which his dark, curly hair filtered as a ponytail in back. He wore a pair of ordinary jeans and a T-shirt of deep blue.

“Careful, there,” he said, and I realized he was no good Samaritan after all. The furthest thing from it. “You wouldn’t want anything horrible to happen on your fun-filled, family-friendly vacation, would you? Now, run along and get home safely. The sooner you get home, the sooner you can come back here to Disney World, and the sooner you can have fun with the cast.”

I practically wrenched myself from his grasp. The last words I heard the man say were “Nice gauntlet, by the way!”.

I caught up to my uncle. I tried to act like everything was fine. But I could still feel the residual pressure from where the stranger had caught me.

On the left side, what it should feel like to be caught by a human hand. On the right, the sensation of four needles pricking into my skin, as if the hand were nothing more than bone.


End file.
